A Pan-African argument by Jack Essim, twelve years after its first quiet release — independently published by his family in 2026.
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Why is Africa — the continent richest in the strategic resources the modern world depends on — also the continent whose people are poorest? Jack Essim spent years answering that question.
Eyes of Sacrifice (The Massacre of Africa) is a Pan-African argument written with the conviction of a man who refused to look away. Drawing on history, scripture, statistics, and the lived realities of the African diaspora, Essim traces the long arc of resource extraction — gold, diamonds, coltan, oil — through colonial conquest, multinational influence, and what he called “the wizards from within”: African leaders complicit in their own continent's diminishment.
But this is not a book about defeat. It is a call for what Essim believed Africa could yet become — united, principled, and finally writing its own history.
First published in 2014 and out of print for years after the author's passing, this 2026 edition is independently published by his family, with a new foreword from his daughter, Natacha Essim. The text is exactly as he wrote it. The argument has not aged. If anything, the events of the past decade have made it more urgent.
Africa is the sleeping giant, and the sleeping giant will rise.
I remember him at our dining room table, surrounded by the books and newspapers and articles he had collected from across the continent, and his enormous dictionary. I watched him write these pages out in his own hand, hour after hour, day after day.
He wrote this book for the younger generations of African descent — so they would understand why Africa has become what it has, who has been responsible for what, and most of all, that Africa is the sleeping giant, and the sleeping giant will rise.
Jack Essim, born Sylvain Jackson Essim in Fotabe, Mamfe (Cameroon), 1944–2018, lived an international life that crossed three continents and more than fifty years of work. Whether the title on his door read Product Manager, Marketing Coordinator, Senior Consultant, D.C. Representative, or Owner and Founder, the question underneath every role was the same: what would Africa look like if Africans wrote its own future?
He began his career in 1968 as Product Manager for Unilever in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, leading the market development of consumer goods sold across the country. It was there that he met Godelive Tsheila, whom he married; they returned together to his native Cameroon in the early 1970s and raised seven children. They remained married for the rest of their lives.
From 1973 to 1990 he worked out of Paris with the BGI Group as Marketing Coordinator for Coca-Cola products across francophone central Africa, including Cameroon (Brasseries du Cameroun), Ivory Coast (BRACODI), Gabon (SEBOGA), and Chad (BGT). He personally launched all Coca-Cola sales and market-development activities in Gabon and Chad. His professional training was conducted by the Coca-Cola Company itself, in Atlanta, in Columbus and Baltimore (Ohio and Mid-Atlantic Coca-Cola Bottling), and in Windsor at Coca-Cola Europe-Africa-Middle East.
In 1990 he founded Jackson Corporation, a fifteen-person consulting firm headquartered in Douala, Cameroon. The firm advised the Hong Kong Trade Development Council on market penetration across Francophone central Africa, and consulted for PROCESS INDUSTRIELS in France on joint ventures, enterprise exchange, and the development of micro-enterprises in the same region.
After moving to the United States, he served as Washington, D.C. representative for Amnesty International USA on issues related to eight francophone countries of central Africa, lobbying the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Congress, heads of foreign diplomatic missions in the United States, and a network of NGOs. He later founded The MoneySeal, Inc., a consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. focused on cash-flow engineering, business intelligence, and funding assistance.
He held a General Certificate of Education in Mathematics from the University of London, studied International Relations at the University of Nebraska Extension, and was a Certified Cash Flow Consultant. He was a member of both the American Cash Flow Association and the American Translators Association (French/English). He spoke and wrote fluently in English and French, and was also fluent in Lingala and his native Kenyang.
Among the phrases he carried his whole life were Rod Chavis's framing of Africa's “indispensability and relevance to world development, global technology, and the wealth of nations,” John Gunther's observation that Africa is “incomparably the greatest potential source of wealth awaiting development in the world,” and his own conviction that “when opportunity meets with possibility, the chemistry is celebrated.”
In Eyes of Sacrifice (The Massacre of Africa), he set out to name those responsible for what has been done to Africa: outside powers, and what he called “the wizards from within.” He argued that the continent's rising was still ahead of it.
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